2of4Mariposa Castro (center) and others attend a candlelight vigil at El Roble Park in Gilroy on Tuesday.Photo: Yalonda M. James / The Chronicle

3of4Alma Rosales, inside her Gilroy shop, shows her grief as she talks about the pain of the Gilroy Garlic Festival shooting Sunday, which killed two children and a man in his 20s.Photo: Jessica Christian / The Chronicle

4of4A memorial for the victims of the Gilroy Garlic Festival shooting is projected on a sign outside Golden State Brew and Grill.Photo: Jessica Christian / The Chronicle

FBI investigators have recovered digital conversations, social media and other communications by the Gilroy Garlic Festival shooter and are studying them to try to determine a motive or ideology behind Santino Legan’s carnage, the agent in charge of the investigation said Wednesday.

“We’re looking at multiple threads of conversations that he’s had,” said John Bennett, special agent in charge. “However, we’re still not comfortable in saying it’s an ideology one way or another.”

Bennett, who runs the San Francisco FBI office, spoke to reporters at the site of Sunday’s shooting that killed three young people and injured 12. He said investigators have not determined Legan’s motive, and that reports that he said linked the shooter to an interest in white supremacy and Islamic extremism were “erroneous and incorrect.”

The San Francisco Chronicle reported that among the items seized in the 19-year-old’s apartment in Walker Lake, Nev., authorities found reading materials linked to white supremacy and Islamic extremism.

In a subsequent conversation with The Chronicle on Wednesday, Bennett said that while papers and books were collected in the apartment, “nothing is clear at this point” about the content of those materials. Bennett said behavioral specialists have been called in to make such determinations.

“There’s a lot of material found in search warrants. We’re still going through that. To call it ideology one way or another is conflicting,” Bennett said. “Just because somebody has a book in their house doesn’t mean they are leaning one way or another.”

He later added: “Whatever was found was not a smoking gun.”

Bennett downplayed the Instagram messages Legan posted moments before the shooting, including one in which the 19-year-old promoted a book widely considered a manifesto of white supremacy. Legan encouraged his social media followers to read “Might Is Right or the Survival of the Fittest.” The fringe book, originally published in the 19th century and since re-released by a handful of small publishing houses, is a call to action against the alleged tyrannies of government and organized religion. The 96-page work encourages the “strong” to rise up over the “weak.”

“The book ... is from 1896. I’m not really sure that’s really high-dollar reading right now,” Bennett told the small group of reporters Wednesday. “That is information that anyone could put out.”

A search warrant obtained by The Chronicle showed that FBI agents discovered the makings of a massive attack, including a gas mask, a bulletproof vest, empty and full boxes of ammunition, gunsmithing equipment, a knife, a camouflage backpack, an empty Valium bottle, electronic hard drives and a mysterious letter from “Virginia to Santino.”

Editor’s note

The Chronicle has decided not to publish photos of the shooter in this case.

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Asked about the letter, Bennett would say only that investigators had seized “conversations between (Legan) and his family.”

The search affidavit and probable-cause statement remained sealed, the district attorney of Mineral County, Nev., said, as the FBI investigates.

On Wednesday, Bennett discounted the importance of the items discovered in the triplex unit overlooking Walker Lake.

“We’re not overly concerned about the things that we found at the apartment in Nevada,” he said.

Bennett called the investigation a slow process in which officials are methodically talking to contacts and poring over financial records. Behavioral profilers will look to “start getting into the mind of the shooter.”

Legan, who grew up in Gilroy and nearby Watsonville, sneaked into the popular festival and opened fire with a semiautomatic rifle near the entertainment stage, sending scores of people fleeing for their lives. Within a minute of his first shots, Legan was shot and killed by three uniformed Gilroy police officers working the festival security.

On Tuesday, Craig Fair, FBI assistant special agent in charge of counterintelligence at the San Francisco office, said there was no indication Legan was firing at any specific groups of people at the fair.

“We have no reason to believe at this point he was targeting any protected characteristics or any class,” he said.

Matthias Gafni joined The San Francisco Chronicle as an enterprise reporter in February 2019. He investigates stories in the East Bay and beyond. For almost two decades, Gafni worked for the Bay Area News Group – San Jose Mercury News, East Bay Times and Vallejo Times-Herald -- covering corruption, child sexual abuse, criminal justice, aviation and more. He was born and raised in the Bay Area and graduated from UC Davis. He lives with his wife and three kids in the East Bay.